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London (Reuters) -- Halliburton Co, the oilfield services company that cemented the blown-out Gulf of Mexico well which caused the United States' worst-ever oil spill, Sunday said a BP report into the disaster that laid the blame on the cement job offered a questionable account of events and “erroneous conclusions.” Halliburton, based in Houston, Texas and Dubai, questioned tests BP said it conducted that showed Halliburton's cement had failed, allowing channels to form, through which hydrocarbons could flow up the well and cause the explosion.

BP, the petroleum giant, has more than doubled its estimate of how much crude oil it spilled this week into Lake Michigan, a source of drinking water for some 7 million people in Chicago and its suburbs. On Monday, BP reported the spill into the lake from its Whiting refinery in northwest Indiana. The U.S. Coast Guard and the federal Environmental Protection Agency have been at the site and have been involved in the cleanup. “Any time you get any type of chemical in land or water, no one wants to see it,” Coast Guard Chief Petty Officer Alan Haraf, a spokesman, told the Los Angeles Times.

Oil giant BP will unload its Southern California gasoline business, including the huge Carson refinery and its local Arco gasoline operations, as part of a broad overhaul following last year's Gulf of Mexico oil spill. BP said Tuesday that it also would sell its Texas City, Texas, refinery, where a 2005 explosion and fire killed 15 people and injured more than 170 others. The sale of the California and Texas facilities will cut BP's refining capacity in half as it moves to divest $30 billion in assets to pay gulf disaster costs.

WASHINGTON - The Environmental Protection Agency and BP announced Thursday an agreement that would allow the energy giant to bid once again on deep-water offshore drilling leases, reversing a government decision two years ago to bar the company from federal contracts following its massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. In what became the country's worst offshore environmental disaster, BP's Macondo well blew out in April 2010, killing 11 workers and spewing more than 4 million barrels of oil into the gulf.

Apache Corp. said Tuesday it agreed to buy a handful of BP's oil and natural gas fields throughout North America and Egypt for $7 billion, though the oil giant's Prudhoe Bay, Alaska operations were not part of the deal. Apache Corp., known for purchasing mature oil and gas properties and wringing more value out of them, will scoop up BP properties in Alberta and British Columbia, as well as the Permian Basin of West Texas and New Mexico and Egypt's Western Desert. All told, the Houston oil and gas company will add estimated proved reserves of 385 million barrels of oil equivalent to its portfolio.

Robots using giant hydraulic shears finished cutting away the pipe atop a BP well gushing oil into the Gulf of Mexico, clearing the way for a cap to be placed over the well on Thursday in an effort to contain the 45-day-old spill. Cutting away the riser pipe is "a significant step forward," Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the national incident commander, said at a briefing Thursday morning. "The challenge now is to seal that containment cap over it." Allen said the shears used in the cutting did not give the clean edges that officials had hoped for, which could make it more difficult to fit the cap tightly over the pipe.

A cap placed atop a gushing well on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico could allow BP officials to begin pumping oil to the surface later Friday, the Coast Guard admiral leading the response to the disaster said, but he warned that strong winds had sent oil surging to the Florida Panhandle and had split the disaster into several slicks that would strain the resources available to clean them up. "The scope of this thing is starting to extend to...

Oil company BP has agreed to plead guilty to misconduct and negligence charges and pay a record $4.5-billion fine in connection with the massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill, one of the nation's worst environmental disasters. In an announcement Thursday morning from its London headquarters, BP confirmed that it had reached an agreement with the U.S. Justice Department to resolve all federal criminal charges and all claims by the Securities and Exchange Commission against the company stemming from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon rig explosion, the subsequent oil spill and the response.

News that BP is unlikely to pay any claims related to mental-health problems caused by the oil spill has angered health groups around the country. On Friday, the American Psychiatric Assn. became the latest organization to demand that BP treat mental-health claims similarly to claims of physical illness or injury caused by the spill. BP claims administrator Kenneth Feinberg testified recently before the House Judiciary Committee that the company will probably not spend any of the $20 billion relief fund to settle mental-health claims.

The British, it seems, are not enamored of British Petroleum, even when it shells out big bucks to support the nation's greatest literary treasure. A group of actors staged their own protest play Monday night before a performance of "The Tempest" at Shakespeare's birthplace, Stratford-upon-Avon, to express their displeasure with a sponsorship deal involving the oil giant. BP is supporting the World Shakespeare Festival, a joint venture between the Royal Shakespeare Co. and the Globe Theatre that is being billed as the biggest Shakespeare festival ever held.

U.S. officials are allowing BP to once again bid on government contracts, lifting a ban imposed on the energy giant after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill. BP reached a deal with the Environmental Protection Agency that opens the door for the London-based company to win federal contracts, including new leases in the Gulf of Mexico, BP said Thursday. "After a lengthy negotiation, BP is pleased to have reached this resolution, which we believe to be fair and reasonable," John Minge, chairman and president of BP America, said in a statement. PHOTOS: World's most expensive cities The EPA imposed the ban in 2012 after concluding that the company did not sufficiently fix issues that led to the well blowout in 2010, which killed 11 workers and leaked millions of gallons of oil. The worst offshore spill in U.S. history also devastated wide stretches of beach in states such as Louisiana and Florida.

No dice, BP. That's what a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals in New Orleans told the giant oil company in a ruling issued late Monday . The judges rejected BP's motion to block payments to victims of the massive Deepwater Horizon oil spill under a settlement the oil company itself had agreed to in 2012. If you're keeping track, that makes one U.S. District judge and two separate three-judge panels of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals that have rejected BP's effort to rewrite its own negotiated settlement.

It would be perfectly proper for BP, the giant British oil company, to feel a sense of corporate remorse. After all, the firm was responsible for the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill disaster, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion and well blowout that took 11 lives and created "immense environmental damage" in and around the gulf. (Those words were uttered by a Department of Justice official just over a year ago, when BP pleaded guilty to a dozen felony charges and agreed to pay $4 billion in penalties and fines.)

A week ago I had a chance to sit down with Namibian supermodel Behati Prinsloo on the overstuffed couch of a downtown L.A. denim atelier to talk about her first foray into fashion -- a capsule collection with THVM due out for spring/summer 2014. While a more in-depth story about that collection and the charmingly funny Prinsloo (who earlier this year got engaged to Maroon 5 frontman Adam Levine) is slated to appear in Sunday's Image section, here are a few excerpts from our conversation that ranged from style inspiration to Instagram to naming a fruit bat. All The Rage: Although I've read all about it on the Internet I wouldn't be doing my journalistic duty if I didn't ask you straight out: You are engaged to Adam Levine, right?

A former engineer for BP was convicted of obstructing an investigation of the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico after the first criminal trial to come from the environmental disaster. Kurt Mix, a drilling engineer who formerly worked for the oil giant, was convicted on Wednesday of obstructing the investigation into the massive spill but acquitted of a second count of obstruction of justice, Justice Department officials announced. Mix, 52, of Katy, Texas, faces up to 20 years in prison when he is sentenced on March 26. Mix is one of four current or former BP employees charged with crimes related to the spill, one of the largest environmental disasters in U.S. history.

The second phase of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill trial begins Monday in New Orleans, restarting a legal juggernaut that could saddle the energy giant with the largest environmental penalty in U.S. history, determine the future health of the Gulf of Mexico and calculate, finally, the amount of crude oil that spewed from the crippled well. The case - which involves a phalanx of federal and state prosecutors, attorneys for several multinational companies, and highly complex engineering testimony - has been droning on with little fanfare since February.

Federal investigators painted a picture Thursday that suggested BP and oil-rig owner Transocean cut corners aboard the doomed Deepwater Horizon, which exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, causing the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history. Investigators have suggested that crew members were under pressure to finish their work aboard the floating mobile oil rig, which was trying to finish off an exploratory well, plug it so a production rig could be put into place and move on to a new site.

The threat of a reduction in the dividend paid by energy giant BP is bringing up bad memories for investors who have suffered similar cuts by other once-reliable companies in the last decade. Under pressure from the Obama administration to show it can foot the bill for the oil spill cleanup in the Gulf of Mexico, BP is contemplating slashing or even suspending the $10.5 billion a year it currently distributes to its shareholders. A decision could come Wednesday after company executives meet with the president.

WASHINGTON -- Oil-field services giant Halliburton has agreed to plead guilty to destroying evidence in connection with the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, the Justice Department announced Thursday. Halliburton has been charged with one count of destruction of evidence in U.S. District Court in New Orleans. Under a plea agreement that is subject to court approval, Halliburton agreed “to pay the maximum-available statutory fine, to be subject to three years of probation and to continue its cooperation in the government's ongoing criminal investigation,” the Justice Department said.

The federal damage assessment of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill should take into account the broader economic and social impacts of the 2010 blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, according to a report released Wednesday by the National Research Council. The group recommended that the federal Natural Resource Damage Assessment and Restoration program consider "ecosystem services" when it calculates the impact of the BP spill, a difficult-to-measure analysis of the services performed by an ecosystem.